Andersonville (1996) on Netflix
Josiah Day is captured at Cold Harbor and sent to Camp Sumter in Georgia. He and Sgt. McSpadden try to keep their company together against the Raiders, prisoners who rob new arrivals.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.3/102,266 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Plot summary
In June 1864, soldiers of Company I, 19th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment are taken prisoner at Cold Harbor in Virginia and transported by train to Georgia, where they are marched into Camp Sumter. Captain Henry Wirz, the commandant, tells the new prisoners that escape is impossible because of his scent hounds, and says a prisoner exchange is expected shortly. A former comrade, Dick Potter, warns them away from the Raiders, a group of fellow prisoners who rob and attack newcomers, and describes the camp's lack of shelter, safe drinking water and food. Private Josiah Day and Sgt. McSpadden try to keep their company together. The guards are teenagers and old men, and some coax prisoners over the dead line fence to be shot.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Andersonville (1996)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
The critical scenes of the trial and hanging of the camp's Raiders were shot over two days, with raw film shipped to Los Angeles labs; the crate was lost in transit by the shipping company and never found. With the Georgia set already torn down, the scenes were re-shot in North Carolina in a week-long, very costly re-shoot.- Andersonville was filmed on a farm about fifty miles south of Atlanta, roughly a hundred miles north of the real prison camp, where a huge, not-quite-to-scale set of Camp Sumter was built with fifteen-foot raw timber walls, thousands of tents, a working stream and a full-scale railway depot with half a wooden locomotive.
- Andersonville used hundreds of extras daily, many of them Civil War reenactors who traveled from all over the nation to take part, and at its height more than four thousand extras a day were employed, forcing an ultra early three a.m. call for a seven a.m. general set call.
- The film is loosely based on the diary of Union soldier John Ransom, who was imprisoned at Andersonville; although some plot points are fabricated, the general conditions of the camp, especially its administration by Captain Henry Wirz, accurately match Ransom's descriptions.
